FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
Read this and this if you genuinely want to understand it. People can't agree on what's right or wrong, what's legal or illegal or what ought to be either. They can't agree on what's murder and what's self-defense and on a million other questions of similar import. They can't agree because their core values drifted too far apart. Liberalism got high on its own supply and lost track of the fact that core human values could differ, and could drift over time unless coherence is enforced. Liberalism didn't want to enforce conformity because that seemed mean and unnecessary, so it declined to do so, and so the values drifted.
All of society is built on a foundation of shared values. When the values are no longer shared, nothing we've built on them works either. Society breaks down, because it all runs on compromise, and humans compromise other things to secure core values, not core values for other things. No more compromise, and shortly thereafter no more society. It's not really complicated, it's just what humans do. More or less everyone has now realized that values have to be enforced, but now they can't agree on whose values get enforced and whose get suppressed. And so we fight.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
He pretty much picks the first statistic he can find that can prove he is right, but he does so by lying about the order initially to make it seem like the opponent was right, oh wait, just kidding it's the other way around. This is poor manner in a debate.
I cannot speak to the manners of formal debate, but it seems to me that this is a reasonable practice. It underlines and attempts to short-circuit the bias of the human mind. If you were delighted to have a number that supported you, it is that much harder to turn around and argue that the number proves nothing when it goes against you.
How do you figure you are not just hearing a Shepard tone of things escalating all the time?
With difficulty and a considerable degree of imprecision.
There is pretty obviously no way to prove it, beyond comparing the predictions I've made and the reasoning underlying them with events as they unfold. @Chrisprattalpharaptr is confident I'm wrong, and has called out what he considers my predictive failures in two previous posts, one immediately preceding Luigi killing the CEO and the other immediately preceding Kirk's murder. And it's fair game; I predicted that the violence would get worse during the rioting, and I predicted that the rioting, compromise of policing, and attendant spike in crime would be lasting. Instead, the rioting finally wound down, "abolish the police" was largely sidelined, and the crime spike declined back to around the previous trend after only four years and a few dozen-thousand additional deaths rather than continuing on for the rest of the decade. I was too pessimistic; in hindsight, I think the "Blue Tribe ran out of mana" explanation is clearly more accurate.
And yet, we have had hundreds of attacks on churches, yearly, for multiple years now; mostly vandalism and harassment, but a notable number of arsons and shootings; my church has a permanent armed security team now, which is novel. We had a nation-wide vandalism and arson campaign against Tesla, with Tim Waltz among others winking and nodding along to in public appearances. We've had a worrying spate of trans school shooters which seem to me to be directly motivated by the tenants of trans ideology. We've had the attempted assassination of Trump missing by the slimmest of chances amid, charitably, criminal incompetence on the part of the Secret Service, and then the very obvious and quite public disappointment in that failure through Blue Tribe, top to bottom. Since then we've seen the rise of assassination culture in Blue Tribe, "who will kill Elon", national polling showing large portions of Blue Tribe endorsing the murder of Trump and Musk. We saw what that looked like in practice with Luigi: widespread, open support for lawless murder throughout blue tribe, again top-to-bottom, with unrestrained glazing from major media organizations and blue-state legislation being named after him. We've seen it again with Kirk: appalling murder met with undeniable, widespread, population-representative-scale gleeful support.
Multi-city riots against ICE have been limited because Trump established punishing escalation dominance from the very start, removing much of their political cover and aggressively prosecuted as many rioters as possible. And even with that federal hammer pounding away, we've seen facilities mobbed and destroyed by rioters, we've seen numerous serious attacks on federal agents, murder of federal agents, and at least one coordinated paramilitary ambush. In the background we're still seeing what appears to me to be clear support from democrat officials to assist all of the above by doxxing ICE agents and releasing the information to the public.
And to CPAR's point, this is a better outcome than I expected; in 2018-2020, I did not expect Trump to escape jail, much less win the 2020 election. The above is what it looks like after the Democratic party imploded itself in one of the most humiliating and catastrophic electoral defeats in modern political history, when their voters have fled and their donors have shut their wallets. This the mayhem Blue Tribe can inflict when at the weakest it's ever been in my entire life. Barring unprecedented measures or outcomes, it will most likely recover and will once again find itself wielding federal power. It almost certainly will exercise that power with a furious vengeance, unconstrained by the norms and structures that are currently being trampled by Trump in the meantime; Blue politicians are already running on a policy of "drive it like you stole it", and their base does not seem inclined to moderation. And why would they be? They're as desperate and policy-starved as my side is.
And even knowing that, I still think this is probably the best possible path forward; maybe Trump can deliver enough obvious improvement in living conditions that we win the midterms and maybe 2028 as well, and maybe enough political defeats in succession can force capitulation from Progressive ideologues and the demolition of their centers of economic, social and political power, and we can actually wind the culture war down. Maybe. Otherwise, it will be the Blue turn to prosecute culture war escalations through federal law, and my side's turn to prosecute escalations outside it. And there's still hope there too! There's a possibility that the struggle over federal power will have done enough damage to federal institutions that those institutions will simply lack the capacity to prosecute the culture war further, and both sides sag back in exhaustion to simply running their own states and communities as best they can. Society pillarizes, sorts, segregates, and good fences make good neighbors. It could happen!
Maybe.
It seems to me that your argument is essentially that things have to get worse because the set of grievances can only monotonically grow, but culture war material also has a certain half-life. People are still alive in the US nowadays that experienced far worse political violence than Charlie Kirk getting shot, but events from the '70s and '80s hardly count for anything because their political valence becomes more and more inscrutable as the past grows foreign.
I still remember that Blue Tribe terrorists and murderers got institutional protection and tenure. But sure, last time it died down, it might die down again. This is true.
Last time it died down because, on the balance, the Blues of the time capitulated.
Let's take a concrete example. I do not think the views this person expresses are fringe within Blue Tribe. I think that, prior to the ongoing backlash sparked by Kirk's murder, I would have been fired from most jobs in my industry for disagreeing with this person about Kirk or objecting to her statements. In order for the Culture War to de-escalate, this person's views have to become fringe, or Kirks views, and mine, have to become fringe. This person is pretty clearly willing to endorse extralegal killing to stave off capitulation. So, as it happens, am I, even if my choice of acceptable targets is considerably stricter. One of us has to lose, and neither of us is willing to accept that loss, and until that changes it seems obvious that the escalations will proceed on their current trajectory. Ozy described the core drive and Zunger did the math more than a decade ago, and everything since then has been fractal iteration.
Did the Unabomber attack Red consumerism on behalf of Blue degrowth, or Blue academia on behalf of Red RETVRNerism? Was Waco Red police brutality or Blue oppression of religious conservatives? Some fringe groups of course still have categorical answers to these, but even two fringe groups that everyone agrees belong on the same side of the spectrum now will not necessarily agree on the answers.
...Having deleted answers to both questions, I will accept that I may be fringe (Ted was much closer to Red, Waco was very, very definitely blue and I would be very surprised to see an existence proof of arguments to the contrary, I can't help myself), but it seems to me that better examples might have been Prohibition and Eugenics. Even there, the answer does not seem like some deep enigma lost to the sands of time; I think most answers from people here would be fairly uniform. It seems to me that the Culture War and the split we currently label red vs blue has been a coherent force for well over a century, and possibly three centuries. In this country, it is easy to see how that split has, over the last hundred years or so, steadily eroded our social and political structures and norms, and how the present unpleasantness is simply the long, slow trend going exponential as the last of our social cohesion burns away.
In any case, it is indeed possible for time to unwind the Culture War. But it is also possible to escalate faster than time alone can unwind, and it seems pretty clear to me that we are now doing that.
Again, the person linked above. Is that person crazy? Is their ideology meaningfully fringe? It's certainly not fringe enough that many millions of people felt uncomfortable expressing similar sentiments privately or publicly over the last two days. It's certainly not fringe enough that I'm confident I could disagree with it publicly and keep my job, even now. I'd give roughly 50% odds that the views they presented, together with views of similar extremity on a variety of other issues, are going to secure federal power in 2028. What do you expect to happen then?
....And all of this is based on the consensus understanding of what we might call the "math" of irreconcilable cultural conflict, which seems to me to give a high probability of things getting very bad. But I think it's actually much worse than that, because the consensus model is badly mistaken in ways that dramatically underestimate how bad things are likely to get, in a similar way and for similar reasons that people underestimated the impact of the iPhone on human interaction before its release.
You may disagree, and if so I'd be interested in hearing where I'm wrong.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6hr ago
That may be true. I'm pretty sure it is true. But the lies I end up believing are unlikely to be Blue Tribe lies, and fury at the perfidy of the foe can use all the restraint it can get.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
No disagreement. Allow me to clarify my statement.
- lying is very common.
- It is common because it is, at least in the short-term, effective.
- Both sides do it, and so the rage felt at an enemy's lies should be tempered by the embarrassment felt for those of your allies. Lying is not a good plan for the long-term, but a lot of people, especially in the trenches, are not really thinking long-term.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
I recall the exact opposite, actually. I remember leftists trying to tell her "step aside you old hag" in polite but forceful terms, and when she didn't there was pretty widespread worry that she had screwed them all (which she definitely did lol).
I remember some of that as the reality of the situation set in, but I remember a whole lot more of this.
And then, hilariously enough, they did the whole thing again with Biden.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
Notably, RGB was not murdered by a right-wing extremist, and her death had been preceded by a long and appalling spectacle where leftists tried to reassure one another that she was totally fine, fit as a fiddle, healthy as a horse. This was after she declined to step down during the tail-end of Obama's tenure because, according to her own side's reporting, she wanted her replacement to be appointed by the first female president.
People were wailing and gnashing teeth about how she should have resigned during a D president while her body was alive and conducting day-to-day activities, because her hubris and that of Blue Tribe's elite structure brought ruin to their tribal works.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10hr ago
It's got a lot of silliness, slice of life humor, and it's, eh, I guess the way I would describe it is sorta the opposite of grimdark. Very optimistic, but not generally in a flippant way. It takes itself seriously most of the time, but Berserk it ain't. I consider that an unalloyed positive, but YMMV.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10hr ago
have you tried Beware of Chicken? My wife and I love it.
Lying is an effective political tactic.
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Numerous lies were told about the events of Jan 6th to cement its political significance. These lies later collapsed, but the significance has largely remained. That was a win for the liars.
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People earlier this week pointed out that the guy who broke into Pelosi's house with a hammer admitted himself, on the record, that he was motivated by batshit right-wing conspiracy theories. At the time, right-wing bullshit about his motivations flew thick and fast, and while I didn't take much of it seriously, neither did I receive the correct info and had assumed since that it was just a random crazy.
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Consider the Birther conspiracy theory. That was, by all available evidence, also a lie. People believed it because they wanted to believe it. Believing that Obama was a contract demon who could be banished by speaking the correct secret words was vastly more comforting than believing they'd lost the election, and so a lot of people believed it and actively worked to get others to believe it too.
Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty. Tolerance is a social norm because it allows different people to live side-by-side without being at each other’s throats. It means that we accept that people may be different from us, in their customs, in their behavior, in their dress, in their sex lives, and that if this doesn’t directly affect our lives, it is none of our business. But the model of a peace treaty differs from the model of a moral precept in one simple way: the protection of a peace treaty only extends to those willing to abide by its terms. It is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact.
[...]
No side, after all, will ever accept a peace in which their most basic needs are not satisfied — their safety, and their power to ensure that safety, most of all. The desire for justice is a desire that we each have such mechanisms to protect ourselves, while still remaining in the context of peace: that the rule of law, for example, will provide us remedy for breaches without having to entirely abandon all peace. Any “peace” which does not satisfy this basic requirement, one which creates an existential threat to one side or the other, can never hold.
If we interpreted tolerance as a moral absolute, or if our rules of conduct were entirely blind to the situation and to previous actions, then we would regard any measures taken against an aggressor as just as bad as the original aggression. But through the lens of a peace treaty, these measures have a different moral standing: they are tools which can restore the peace.
Right-wingers perceive left-wingers to be approving of and encouraging the murder of people like them. This is because a lot of leftists objectively, unquestionably are doing so, and a lot of other leftists are doing things that are arguably doing that, or in some cases flirting with it, or in some cases might be perceived as flirting with it, etc. down the chain of increasing abstraction.
I think you are probably correct that in at least some cases, celebratory leftists perceive Kirk's death as some crazy random happenstance like a lightning strike; I have not yet observed the limits of human self-delusion. I am not sure what can be done for such people, any more than I have a solution to the tide pod challenge. Some people apparently need to learn the hard way.
I am not arguing that people should be able to watch porn at work, or that people should be able to use racial slurs. I am saying that some approximation of the respect people like me have been required by federal law to extend to those different from us must now be reciprocated toward us, that this reciprocation being enforced by the same federal law is perfectly acceptable to me, and that those who object at this have no leg to stand on.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14hr ago
The argument is not that "Billions Must Die" because some brainrotted person shot Charlie Kirk. The argument is that society is a complex machine, and keeping it running requires a degree of base-level values-coherence. Kirk's murder, and the left's extremely public reaction to that murder, are demonstrations that the minimum level of values-coherence no longer exists.
I think you are wrong that this incident will be forgotten; for that matter, I think you are wrong that Luigi has been forgotten. But it scarcely matters. This murder was not a fluke, but rather a stochastically-predictable result of many millions of people trying to live together with many millions of other people whose values and worldview are mutually exclusive. Events like this are going to keep happening, and they are going to keep generating common knowledge, which will in turn drive further action.
It's fairly probable that at some point in the next few years, Blues are going to gain significant political power. When they do, they are going to exercise that power in predictable ways: they will escalate. Reds will react to that exercise in predictable ways: they will escalate back. This murder will shape the backlash to the backlash to the backlash, and it will shape it for the worse. Reds are by no means prepared to be ruled the way Trump is currently ruling Blues. Blues are not prepared to have murder of their champions treated the way they are treating Kirk's murder. Both are very likely to be forced to react to such treatment in the relatively-near future, and neither is likely to do so in a way that we might, from a detached and nonpartisan perspective, consider "pro-social".
No, it isn't. If civil war breaks out Blue vs. Red in the US, it's going to be an excuse for every other [Blue-aligned] province of the American empire to descend into the despotism whose agenda they are even today ahead of the US in implementing.
Looking at how things are going across the water, I'm not sure that will work any better for them than it will for local blues. The scenario I can see where we actually get durable blue totalitarianism is one where AI goes FOOM, it's alignable and they align it. Short of that, I do not think that future is going to go the way you are thinking it will go, for reasons that boil down to society being a lot more fragile than people appreciate.
All that said, the advice is not "go to Europe". Australia or new zealand, possibly japan, maybe some of the quieter parts of Asia would be my uneducated guess.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I actually moved to Canada for a couple years under Bush, and seriously considered renouncing my US citizenship.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Something that is constantly invoked in heated political signaling competitions, but who actually does it?
I did it, once upon a time, and somewhat foolishly. Maybe I'm wrong this time too, but I don't think I am. If our society ruptures, it is going to get bad beyond the wildest imagination of even the people who've actually gone out of their way to imagine it.
There are a non-zero number of offramps: sufficiently-decisive political victory that one side or the other capitulates, abrupt prosperity due to AI or robotics sufficient that everyone is too busy being insanely rich to care about politics any more, maybe two or three others. Potentially, Christ might return on a cloud to judge the Quick and the Dead.
The odds of you and those you know and love (and to be crystal clear here, this is a fully-general you, red, blue, grey, every human in the continental US) dying screaming increased significantly this week, and the action most likely to significantly counter that likelihood is to leave the country. What you see happening around you is happening because many millions of people want it to happen, and are willing to work to make it happen. Momentum and a good many other things are on their side.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I think a large chunk of it is that people on the Left of you are just more inherently sympathetic than the other way.
...Suffice to say, that is not an intuition I share. A considerable number of current leftists are isomorphic to Nazis.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Maybe you disagree there's an implication like that made with such an exception, or heck maybe you believe that children who get shot or military who die aren't deserving of prayer in the same way, but I hope you can understand the point at least.
For what it's worth, I can. I think I have an understanding of why Reds are infuriated over it, but I think their fury is foolish and counterproductive.
What makes you think than your employer would have no problem with you saying that even if the potential liability didn't exist?
I am not claiming that my employer and most potential employers would not discriminate against me; I am saying that I am in favor of the sorts of laws they have used to coordinate such discrimination should be used to coordinate discrimination against my enemies as well, and that I am entirely comfortable with the federal government forcing them to do so regardless of their personal wishes.
I am pointing out that we have been abridging free speech through the power of federal law for more than thirty years, and the core purpose and justification of these abridgements absolutely applies here. I understand that to a first approximation, no one ever actually meant all that horseshit about fair, meta-level principled opposition to discrimination against the Other; it is enough to make that fact abundantly clear.
To the extent that there was ever a justification for legal restrictions against "hate" and "prejudice" and "bigotry", it applies here. To the extent that it does not apply here, every instance of acceptance and cooperation with these laws for the last fifty fucking years has been a swindle.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
But the liberal system and norms that we enjoy in the US, which the First Amendment is part of, is why you largely don't have to worry about sitting in jail for your political opinions.
The reason I don't have to worry about being jailed for my opinions is because I live among people who share them, and are willing to coordinate meanness to provide protection against those who disagree. Where the protections of a values-aligned community are absent, my next-best protection is OPSEC, pseudanonymity. Third place is guns and a willingness to use them. The "Liberal System" does not place, as it is a intellectually-masterbatory fiction.
Getting fired or canceled for your political opinions is bad, but sitting in jail or getting killed by government agents for them is much worse.
Is Charlie Kirk less dead because it wasn't a government agent who shot him? Government exists to coordinate action. There are other ways to coordinate action as well. I care about the actions being coordinated, not the method used to coordinate them.
By coordinating meanness against Blues through the government, I compromise their ability to coordinate meanness against me. Since I am advocating doing so in exactly the way they have been coordinating meanness against me for decades, I see no reason why moderates such as yourself should see my coordination as more objectionable than theirs. Moderate arguments failed to moderate them; why should they moderate me?
Punishing people for celebrating and endorsing political murders makes us all marginally safer. Refraining to do so makes us all worse off, and does not even protect free speech in any principled way in the bargain.
I decline to extend political or social rights to those who hate me that have been systematically stripped from and denied to myself and my allies for decades or more, and will never in any case be allowed to protect us in any way in the future.
If you pride yourself on your memory, exercise it by recalling the legal term "hostile work environment", the similar terms that cover most social spaces, and the numerous examples of how they have been applied by courts nation-wide over the last few decades.
Anyone who is moved by appeals to free speech at this late date deserves their victimization. Free Speech is a spook. The First Amendment offers me no meaningful protection, and I see no benefit to compromising my interests to honor its thoroughly-desecrated corpse. Complying with your proposal will not delay by a single second the next attempt to censor and criminalize my beliefs and to render people like me unemployable when identified. I defy you to argue otherwise.
Principles are things you are willing to lose for. I decline to treat free speech as a principle.
School shootings are not generally committed by ideological allies of the right, nor aimed specifically at leftists because they are leftists. This was not random badness striking a man down. The people saying get over it are the same people who convinced this person to kill.
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